


Trinity

by bowlofsurreal



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Action/Adventure, Best Friends, Crossover, Drama & Romance, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-02-03 20:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12755190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bowlofsurreal/pseuds/bowlofsurreal
Summary: Three of the baddest motherfuckers in the wastes take on the Big Bad Institute—It's 2287. Six and 101 hit the Commonwealth Wasteland with a message for the General of the Minutemen.





	1. I Commonweatlh

Sunrise sliced the gaps in the boarded windows, and the gauzy, useless curtains, and straight down the median of Six’s frontal lobe like a chainsaw. The old mattress creaked; Six groaned, and the dust of the dirty old pillow filled their lungs. It smelt of rain and mold and stale cigarettes. 

An alert knock—“Six, psst,” a flat voice in a stage whisper. “Are you up?” 

Butt naked, Six sprawled on the sticky August bedsheets of the Rexford Hotel’s most exceptional room. Sweat beaded on their forehead; the sleepy dreamworld of iced cold Sunset Sarsaparilla and whiskey receded. “Hold up,” tugged on threadbare jeans pooled on the floor. The door swung open to Six buttoning a red flannel shirt, cigarette pressed by dry, painful lips.

The stormy, morning light on Camilla Jones’s dark skin highlighted its gloss, dewy across her high cheekbones; the regal shape of her features. “I’ve been up for hours,” she said, gliding, big book cradled under her arm like a child and then, startled as if for the first time, Six’s rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and she continued, obligated, “good morning, then.” 

“Morning,” Six grumbled, bed dented with their weight. A practiced flick of their wrist, the flint struck, lighting the stog with ease.

The yellowed pages of the leather-bound tome flipped open, a treasure pulled from the ruined stacks of a mutant-infested library. “This area has a fascinating history,” Cam appraised, fixed her eyes. “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, founded by the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620.” 

An uninterested sound escaped, Six licked their lips, dragging on their cigarette. “16-what? Forget it, kid—might as well be a world away. Ain’t no more fuckin’ Pilgrims.” Six couldn’t listen to any more of Cam’s good-natured, vault-intellectual babble, pre-war U-S-of-A a mumbo jumbo. Finish this gig and move on to the next shitty town, stay alive, see the wasteland, that was the plan. Maybe head back west, or yo-yo up and down the east coast like Six dreamed themselves a master of both oceanic frontiers, existed only in a state of transition. 

Thunder cracked high above them and groaned a thick rumble in their ears. A bright green cast flickered harsh shadows on their faces—Geiger counters crackled in harmony. 

Six’s lazy mornings: full of whiskey shits, a shot or two to halt the shake in their aim, rubbed the dirt away from the creases with dirty water, and a meandering, lazy type of breakfast including eggs and steak and sugar bombs, which tore relentless through their supplies. 

Cam had followed the courier from the Capital, followed the spirit of a beautiful stranger and the possibilities—new species of herbs, active compounds for medicinal derivatives. Eager to get away from the acrid, lonely memories there among the ruins and the complacency she fell into, lost in the ranks the Brotherhood of Steel. Within the high stone walls of the Citadel, unfettered in the sea of technological resources, shiny new toys but god, did it depress her. The single-minded devotion to superiority was exhausting, the seduction of innovation left hollow by bigoted, archaic ideology. 

As poor a fit for home as Vault 101, it left her wanting more. . . and so, on the road with Six, the lone wanderer wandered north, this time with the company to keep, a sharpshooter to watch her back.  

The trip had devolved into a long road of moonshine and mischief, drunken nights and gunslinging, lucky-to-see-the-sunrise days burned and blistered. Six swindled folks for their caps, pinched a few liquor bottles under Cam’s innocuous taciturnity. She admired the rough, calloused hands of the courier, the spiraled red-inked mark of twin lizards crawled up their arms in a geometric maze. 

Tethered in the pitch black night, cold but their fingers interlocked, the wind howled a sad song which rivaled the coyotes. Six pretended they were doing Cam a favor in the secret darkness of their canvas tent, but fell asleep with her hand clutched to their chest. 

Their hearts spilled carefully spread so many nights in the wastes. A blanket of the starry sky muffled their secrets, never kissing, but always wondering if they might, the electric zap of an incidental touch. 

So clean and prim, Cam and her tight blue jumpsuit with a gold one-zero-one stitched on the back, her polished boots, and tight laces, her coarse hair braided in a halo. She had the youthful plumpness only grown in Vault-Tec vaults, broad nose deep in some thick textbook. The kid tripped every trap from here to the Potomac, but god, she was smart, always knew the best way to treat a wound, the fastest route south, the easiest way to hack a terminal. The two of them fed, hydrated, and stocked up on ammo, thanks to the vaultie—and for that, the courier thanked their lucky goddamn stars. 

 

* * *

 

 

“Sanctuary, huh?” The shopkeeper’s dark eyes narrowed, looking Six up and down with unexpected cautiousness. Withholding, coy in her old age, she turned the words over on her tongue, “big ol’ Minutemen outpost up in the plains outside the city, past Concord.” 

The eponymous ghoul Daisy’s Discounts, shifted her weight, joints cracking as she leaned against the filthy counter. “People ain’t got much faith in ‘em these days,” she mused,  “but the new General’s got them in shape. Lil’ rough ‘round the edges but if the kid ain’t got follow through.” 

“Sanctuary, huh?” Six adjusted their black rattan cowboy hat, two plaits of long black hair on their broad shoulders like a vestment stole. Daisy tapped her fingernail on the screen. Six asked, “‘bout how many hours from here?” 

“Seven, maybe eight. A day’s trip at least,” Daisy weighed. “And that’s on a good one.” 

The Commonwealth Wastes were more barren than Six knew, daydreamed about the cozy luxuries of the Lucky 38; running water, well-stocked shops, a pretty girl on every street corner. Sixty days on the road, every fucking joint seemed picked clean, just moldy food and radroach droppings. Spent more shells than scavenged looting raiders for their scrap. These days, Six was more and more familiar with their rusted old golf driver, arcing blood across the sky.

Goodneighbor stank of piss and garbage, big decrepit buildings jaggedly framed the starry sky overhead, narrow alleyways cut through the dense landscape; Six felt right at home, spitting dip on the dirty cobblestones. 

“C,” Six tossed her a box of fresh .50 ammo underhand. It landed in the gutter of Cam’s current spring of knowledge, ‘American Medical Botany’, a red leather-bound tome of 200 years and 200 pages, among the plants long extinct, right between polygala rubella and nymphea ordorata. 

Cam startled, “What? Oh… thank you.” Her scratched black-rimmed reading glasses sat low on her nose. Dark eyes swiftly darted as she entered information into the notes of her Pip-Boy. 

“Even paid for ‘em with hard-earned caps,” Six shot her a broad grin of crooked teeth. 

The unexpected pinched-up cackle of the vault dweller, shaking the loose strands of baby hair from her temples with a springy bounce. “Please, I’ll believe it when I see it.” 

 

* * *

 

 

Moss-covered marble headstones sat akimbo in the thick sandy mud, putrid mutant fish pecked to death by monstrous seagulls littered the graveyard half-sank into the riverbank. 

A horde of feral ghouls closed in on them, Six and Cam shouted at each other, words overlapping, craning their necks around, vocal chords tense, over the grinding buzz of Cam’s ripper through wet flesh and the click-thump-boom of Six’s sawed-off shotgun blasting their eardrums to shit. 

“—uphill—” 

“—through the—” 

“—south or we—” 

“—break for—” 

A sharp ring reverberated in their ears and drowned the chaos of noise, and an aching calm muted the nasty snarls of the last wave of ghouls. Cam held her ripper in front of her, ghoul limbs flying in a spray of blood. Cam liked due preparation and a heavy kit backed with research and ration. But she could scrap as hard as the rest, no matter the circumstances. A glowing one lunged through the air. Cam ducked and sliced its neon face off as it fell at her feet. 

Six turned to the last open-mouthed feral, crippled, the meat of its leg hung on by its rotting flesh, unable to crawl its way towards them with its hands. “My man won’t even give up,” Six lamented, lining up their shot. “I almost feel bad for it.” 

Cam made a gruff sound and shrugged her thin shoulders as she turned away. The feral reared its head back, and a second later, its head exploded with a pop of blood and shotgun pellets. 


	2. Chapter 2

The sun shone bright orange and high in the hazy sky. A hubflower bush burst through the pavement, a cluster of dark, jagged leaves snipped by surgical scissors and pressed flat into a notebook, neighbored to the long finger of a purple flower. “Ah, the _hubis floris_ ,” Six remarked in smug facetiousness, a stupid smirk on their face. Squawking birds lined the bank of the Charles River, this gnarled chorus companion for the pair’s sweat-drenched backs and aching feet’s respite.

Gun oil was Six’s favorite smell. The rag twisted into each crevice and divot, the sweet spots of their sawed-off shotgun. Their thumb massaged the slide, wiped away the dried blood and dirt. The piece already christened with gritty rust long before the courier picked it up in the desert. Big Boomer, in big white letters etched into the scratched wooden grip, a friendly name for such a beast of a scattergun.

“Hub isn’t Latin, Six,” Cam corrected, “probably dialectical,” scribbled something indiscernible alongside the specimen in her looping handwriting.

The sound of gunfire echoed across the river. Six choked on their retort. They reloaded Big Boomer with fresh 12 gauge rounds, strained to listen. _Clnk_ —the shotgun flipped closed, and they turned to Cam, “think we’re missin’ a party?”

The fray center stage in the open street, curtained by the crumbled bridge as Cam and Six broke into a sprint, hopping over the shells of abandoned cars. Not their style to run and hide. Strung out raiders buzzed, swayed in the middle of the street, weapons drawn. Loose taunts fell flat on the sizzling asphalt. Med fumes poured off their languid movement.

But then, out of the undulating heat, some leather jacket wearing motherfucker in a black balaclava, slid from cover to cover: behind a moss-covered pillar, a rusted mailbox, a thick line of brush—as each dumb raider turned their back the glint of a slick black pistol emerged and fired a couple silenced headshots. The bodies of their comrades dropped around them put the rest into a paranoid tizzy, energy pitched. Leather Jacket stayed cool, calm, and collected—retreated towards the water as the raiders surged. A bald man with soot smeared across his face bolted around the corner right into Leather Jacket’s range with his machete raised. With a swift blade, Leather Jacket drew a stripe of bright red blood from the man’s throat. He gurgled and gasped as he crumpled to his knees. Leather Jacket got to their feet and popped a silent shot off into the back of the raider’s head.

The last two raiders fired blindly, wildly and Six took this as their opportunity to join in the fun, Cam close at their back. Six knocked back a monstrous woman wielding a sledgehammer with a shot to the chest; the cage armor rattled as they emptied their shotgun. Before Cam even got the blades of her ripper spinning, Leather Jacket knocked the last raider to the ground with a swift leg kick and fired two rounds right between the eyes. The pip-boy on the wrist of this capable stranger made Cam stop. She clipped the ripper to her hip and glanced at Six with a silent nod.

The stranger pulled back their balaclava, pulled down their grimy goggles, and revealed a flat brown face with cat-like eyes which appraised them with a guarded but undoubtedly curious gaze. She wore a tattered flight harness, reinforced with heavy combat armor smeared with black paint, and the bulky leather jacket hid her petite frame. Her steel-toed boots were dirty, and her unusual features, the small triangle of her nose, the rosebud curve of her lips, all smeared with dirt and blood.

She slid her pistol into the shoulder holster hidden in the flap of her leather jacket and offered them open hands.

“Holy shit, thank fuck for you guys,” she said in her husky, smoke-burned voice, skirted around the splayed corpses like spilled milk.

“We heard a ruckus from across the river,” Six drawled, stepped forward for a handshake. “Looked like you coulda used some help.”

“Motherfuckers ambushed my ass when I came out of the hospital,” jerked a thumb over her shoulder, “lazy asses waiting to get their hands on my shit.”

“My name’s Six, over there is Cam.”

Cam lifted her chin in silent acknowledgment, face calm and expressionless, shifted her weight at Six’s back. The courier shrugged, “she takes a bit to warm up to people.”

“Call me Rocky,” she said with a wolfish smile which nearly knocked Six on their ass. 

 

* * *

 

 

After the raiders were picked clean of their loot, the three of them stood around and adjusted their packs while they contemplated their next steps. The light rays of low-hung sun poured through the dark clouds gathered in the sky. Rocky rubbed her head; her dark hair buzzed close like peach fuzz, tapered down to her sunburned neck. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Hotter than the fuckin’ devil’s dick today,” she grumbled.

“Comin’ from out west, this ain’t nothing compared to the desert.” Six tipped up their hat and sent their eyes to the sky, watching the cloud stitch together into a heavy gray curtain over the blue sky, “but it’s lookin’ ready to storm any minute now.”

“I’m just up the road if y’all need a place to crash tonight,” Rocky propositioned, “least I could, y’know, for your help.”

Six shrugged and looked to Cam. A silence stretched between them—a loud drum of thunder hit above them as the sun disappeared behind the clouds. “Right, thank you,” Cam finally spoke. The three started off down the road.

Rocky still wasn’t sure if this woman, regal, and uptight, untimely beautiful, was timid or cold but something about it all drew her in as if the nearness would give her insight into the quiet hum of Cam’s energy.

Hangman’s Alley stood up tall, a stacked a haphazard 6 or 7 stories among the downtown Boston skyscrapers. A provisioner wrangled their unruly-looking brahmin through the narrow alley exit as they passed. Rocky gave him a light knock on nuts, cackling as she danced around the icy glare the provisioner threw back, doubled over.

“Man, fuck you, Rock… workin’ here,” He grunted, tugging at the brahmin’s harness.

“Yeah, fucking working to get that fat fuck to the street,” she returned, smacking the brahmin on the haunches. “Now git, the Slog ain’t waiting around forever for a shipment of steel.” A row of clunky laser turrets dinged with pockmarks lined the entrance. A small farmstead with a lone, famished brahmin led into a market crowded with stalls, the massive rumble of overlapped chatter echoed up the brick walls.

They followed Rocky up the stairs at the back, a creaky set of ladder steps bent underfoot. They were greeted by a welcoming sign, ‘The Alley Cat’ lit up in neon lights. Uproariously drunk locals packed the skinny little bar to the brim. The remaining floors were sectioned off into cubbyhole apartments. The shuffled single-file past rows of doors and flickering gas lanterns, rugs patched with mold, weary-looking guards dragged themselves up and down the narrow halls before they reached a green door at the end of the 6th floor.

“Home sweet fuckin’ home,” Rocky said.

“Nice digs,” Six whistled.

She switched on the one bare light bulb in the center of the small room crammed full of guns and drugs and vintage books, “ain’t pretty but keeps out the rain and rads. What’s mine is yours.”

Their host excused herself to the market for some handy work and a hard drink. Six and Cam poked around and settled in for the night.

“So, what do you think?” Six raised their bushy eyebrows, slouched down on the couch. A dingy Brahmin skull sat on the coffee table full of cigarette butts. Six, as if selecting a diamond from the rubble, plucked a half-smoked stog and lit it up.

Three books Rocky’s shelf already laid out in front of her, Cam didn’t look up from the hefty text in her lap. She hummed sound of indifference, sitting on her heels, “I don’t know yet.”

“Dunno?”

“Yeah, don’t know,” she repeated, exasperated. Cam looked at Six as if things were obvious, panged their sense of oft-ridiculed density. Six was not a subtle kind of character, subtleties lost on their rural sensibilities. “Just not ready to say,” She didn’t mean to bruise Six’s ego but could tell it was. Six enjoyed the thrill of a dry place to sleep and a new place to drink. They liked to be in on the vaultie’s, but Cam needed to keep a fair bit to herself sometimes.

“Right, then,” suddenly wistfully shy, Six stubbed out their cigarette and got to their feet.

A self-guided tour of Hangman’s Alley’s bleak halls gave Six a much better feel of the urban settlement. They wandered downstairs and followed the clanging piano riff of Ray Smith’s Right Behind You Baby as it grew louder.

The door jammed so Six gave it a mighty shove and nearly stumbled over the threshold into the Alley Cat. But no one so much as looked up from their drinks as Six squeezed inside. Six gave a proper glance around as they moved through the human ocean, swaying, and murmuring with inebriated joy. Strings of lights lined windows framed the dark outside, every fifth or six bulb shattered into a jagged star. Just a few tables but each with a minimum of 6 chairs pulled up, some patrons lounged on each other’s laps, grasped at lapels to keep from tipping over onto the beer-soaked floor.

“Six!” Rocky exclaimed arms splayed wide as if they were long due for a reunion. Considerably drunk, her mechanic jumpsuit zipped down to her tits, sleeves rolled up. Her arms wrapped them in a big hug, smelling of motor oil, sweat, and dirt. “Let me buy you a fuckin’ drink.”

“Where’s your friend?” Rocky inquired, dark eyes slid half closed, held her middle and index fingers up to the bartender for two more drinks. Her eyes scanned the dark bar.

"Deep in your book collection, couldn’t tear her away.” The too-warm beer foamed with thick head in the chipped glass, but Six chugged down the bitterness without a grimace.

“Shame,” Rocky lamented. “Seems bright as fuck, maybe a little reserved. Shit reminds me of myself once upon a time.”

Six laughed; they couldn’t draw up the resemblance. Once, they had been fooled by Cam’s bookish demeanor, too. “Girl’s proper famous in the Capital, she hooked up the entire region with clean drinking water and took a few names doin’ it. That was ten years ago, though, she ain’t like to brag.”

“What about you?” Rocky leaned in close, voice dropped to a whisper and Six couldn’t tell if that bedroom look in her eyes was real or just the messy power grid and dim lights.

Six stared down to the bottom of the empty glass. “I’m from out west. Just a courier lookin’ to see the world, you know? Seen a lot of shit hauling other people’s packages but never seen a place quite like this before. Did you build all this up? You’re just a kid, all rosy-cheeked underneath it all I reckon.”

“I might look young but a real fuckin’ long young.” Rocky knocked back the rest of her beer, fumbled for a cigarette. Like two hundred goddamn years long. She burped a stink of wheat and tobacco.

“I heard that, friend.”

 

* * *

 

 

Six was born the day they woke up in a dusty Goodsprings house on the hill, a kindly doctor with the wandering twang of the southwest region leaned over them; Six cracked open a new start, with a smoker’s cough, a bum knee and a hole in their head.

Waking up was like coming up for air after a lifetime underwater. They focused on one day, one star-filled night sky, one couriering gig at a time. The Mojave was an unforgiving wasteland. Arid and desolate, it didn’t give heed to Six’s internal tumult. They were left to find a battle cry, a sense of purpose, for vigilante justice to secure some form of real independence, for themselves, for New Vegas.

Years past before the past bled back in a dizzying waltz, a step forward and then a step back. Little things grew loud, yao guai pelts sent a tactile shock through their fingertips as skilled hands skinned with inexplicable ease, memories of ink piercing their young skin with pride and blunt pain as Six’s fingers traced the patterns on their forearm, the nostalgia burned for a starry sky in lieu of bright neon light-pollution, dreamed of high-walled red rock canyons, the numb tranquil feeling of floating, wading in a shallow river as clear as glass, _roo too nait, ahk iss_. Six woke with a tickle in their throat, and a heavy, heavy weight in their heart sank to the pit of their pelvis.  

The second Six set their eyes on the starry night sky in Zion, an entire life came back to them in an instant, born to a Dead Horses shaman in the waters of the Virgin River, their first Bighorner speared in their rite of passage, their life promised to protect the Spirit of the Land. Wolf Moon, their mother named them on a cold January night and a warrior they would become to defend their tribe.

Young and dumb, Six fell in love with a cruel blonde caravanner from New Canaan. Feeling foolish in their tribal pelts, Six donned heavy owslandr garb that itched their sunbaked skin and traveled to Nevada as a hired gun on the promise of love. And lost it all.

Home, they finally returned home to their brothers and sisters, to the shrine of their mother. They fell at the feet of a new war chief, a bandaged man called Joshua Graham who saved their people from annihilation, and they wept for all they lost, for everything stolen by the clown in the checkered suit the night they were buried alive.

“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you,” Joshua said to them, which echoed far into the darkened cave and Six found their despair abated.

Atonement, as it often did in the wasteland, came in bloodshed but for the Dead Horses and the land which nourished them. It was a small drop in the ocean of frivolous death and mayhem Six manifested in their years. 

Six knew they could not stay in Eastern Virgin, re-assimilation impossible with the weight of the outside world on their shoulders. Six liked their cigarettes and shotguns, their Sugar Bombs and soda. When they left Zion to head east towards the unknown, Six felt born again, for a third time, back into the stream of rebirth and redemption, and finally felt peace.


End file.
